Managing storage in enterprise configurations is a complex process that presents information technology (IT) departments with many challenges. One such challenge is defining and implementing corporate storage policies. Another challenge is related to what is essentially an explosion in the amount of data to store, which forces IT departments to continually readjust existing storage policies according to usage growth. Yet another challenge is redefining the storage policies as a response to the changes in the utilization model, such as when installing new applications, handling organizational changes, service level agreement (SLA) changes, and so forth.
“Storage Reports” is a service comprising a technology/functionality that provides a set of storage reports to be used by IT administrators to efficiently audit and track the file-system and quota usage for large volumes. For example, an administrator may want to see a sorted list of all files larger than one-hundred megabytes on a given namespace, sorted by size, and with summary information on totals. Another such report may provide summary information for each file type (e.g., “Media Files”) on a given namespace, including the one-hundred largest files within each file type category. Thus, storage reports help an administrator identify inefficient use of storage, implement mechanisms to prevent future misuse, monitor usage patterns and utilization levels on file servers and other servers, anticipate storage needs, analyze emergency situations and take preventive and/or corrective actions.
While storage reports thus provide valuable functionality, generating the storage reports can take a considerable amount of time, and also consume significant input/output (I/O) and processor resources. This is because in general, to generate a storage report requires scanning one or more storage volumes, each of which may be very large. For example, scanning a terabyte-sized volume may take on the order of hours, with significant disk I/O and data processing required to perform the scan.
In general, better storage management tools are needed in management software. One valuable improvement would provide a way to generate storage reports that is efficient, fast and non-intrusive in terms of resource consumption.